Cambridge International Chemistry 9701
A Level Chemistry, the way the paper expects you to write it.
Designed and taught by Bilal Hameed. Twenty-four years in education, thousands taught directly, and one complete route through AS and A2 Chemistry.
Chemistry is the subject I still teach myself
I have worked in education since 2002: in classrooms, in the three schools I helped build or run, and through Alt Academy. Chemistry is the subject on which I built my teaching career.
I designed the course around a problem I have watched for more than two decades. Students can know the topic and still fail to produce the answer the paper is asking for. They recognise the chapter, recall the notes, and then lose the mark in selection, application, working or language.
The course therefore teaches two things together: the chemistry itself and the performance the examination requires.
Physical. Inorganic. Organic. One path through.
The syllabus is broad, but it is not a pile of unrelated chapters.
Foundations and physical chemistry
Atomic structure, stoichiometry and bonding support almost everything that follows. Energetics, equilibria, electrochemistry and kinetics then ask students to use those foundations in calculations, models and explanations.
The aim is not to collect formulas. It is to know what each quantity means, which relationship applies, and what the result says chemically.
Inorganic chemistry
Periodicity, Group chemistry and transition elements become easier when students can see the forces and patterns underneath them. A list of trends is fragile. A model that explains the trends can be used again when the paper changes the context.
Organic chemistry
Organic Chemistry is taught through mechanisms and reaction relationships, not as a wall of disconnected reagents. Students learn where the electrons begin, where they move, why the conditions matter, and how one functional group connects to the next.
Mark schemes tell you the answer. Teaching should show you how to write it.
Cambridge Chemistry asks students to work across five components: multiple choice, AS structured questions, AS practical work, A2 structured questions, and planning, analysis and evaluation.
Each paper rewards a different mixture of knowledge, reasoning, calculation, practical judgment and precise expression. Past-paper work is most useful when it surfaces those differences instead of reducing every mistake to another answer to memorise.
Inside Alt Academy, the course combines structured video lessons, notes, checks for understanding, worksheets, revision resources and solved past-paper support. The pieces are sequenced as one course rather than left as a collection the student has to organise.
Paper 5 is a thinking paper
Students often fear Paper 5 because the question does not resemble a chapter they can revise in isolation. It asks them to plan, interpret, evaluate and make decisions from unfamiliar information.
That requires its own practice. Students need to understand what is being controlled, measured and inferred; how uncertainty affects a conclusion; and why a mark scheme rewards one structure rather than another.
Online preparation can develop that reasoning. It does not replace the hands-on laboratory experience required for practical Chemistry.
What the course asks from the student
The course does not replace effort. It gives the effort a sequence.
A student still has to pause the lesson, attempt the calculation, draw the mechanism, explain the observation, inspect the mistake and return later to see whether the correction survived.
The standard is not that every video has been watched. The standard is that the student can face an unfamiliar question with less prompting and produce reasoning an examiner can follow.
Continue to Alt Academy
The course platform, current access options and enrolment live on Alt Academy.
Explore the full Cambridge International A Level Chemistry course on Alt Academy.
You can return to my wider approach to Chemistry teaching or read about the two transition courses: O Level to AS and AS to A2.